It is very dangerous for a driver to have a camera in his or her hand to capture an image of an object while driving a vehicle. Even in a case in which a fellow passenger captures an image of an object, the camera which the fellow passenger has in his or her hand is not stabilized while the driver drives the vehicle and it is therefore difficult to provide an image free from camera movement. Furthermore, because a vehicle does not necessarily travel at a constant speed, it is difficult to specify the time of capturing an image at a capture point outside the vehicle.
In order to solve this problem, patent reference 1 discloses a vehicle-mounted image capturing device that captures an image of a scene appearing in a direction at which the driver desires to look at a predetermined image capture position to display the image. This vehicle-mounted image capturing device includes five image capturing cameras mounted on a vehicle, for capturing an image of an object on a forward left side of the vehicle, an image of an object on a forward right side of the vehicle, an image of an object on a backward left side of the vehicle, an image of an object on a backward right side of the vehicle, and an image of an object on a back side of the vehicle. Image capturing conditions including the predetermined image capture position, an image capturing camera used for image capturing, a traveling direction, a gear transmission shift position, and a vehicle speed are pre-registered into an external memory. When the current position of the vehicle detected by a position detector is the predetermined image capture position or close to the predetermined image capture position and the image capturing conditions are satisfied, the vehicle-mounted image capturing device captures an image of a scene appearing outside the vehicle by using the specified image capturing camera, and displays the image on a display unit. Furthermore, information about a recommended image capture point is downloaded from a server, and the recommended image capture point is automatically set as an image capture point.
Furthermore, patent reference 2 discloses an image capturing system for vehicle that can capture an image of an object safely even when the vehicle is travelling and that can automatically capture an image of an object to be captured without causing a passenger to perform a certain operation when the position of the object to be captured has been determined beforehand. This image capturing system for vehicle detects the position of the vehicle by using a main part of a navigation system and records information about objects to be imaged, such as buildings and sightseeing areas on map information recorded in a map CD, into an MO disk, and also specifies an object to be captured recorded in the MO disk by using an image capturing condition input unit. A determining means then determines the distance and heading of the vehicle from the vehicle position detected by the main part of the navigation system on the map information recorded in the map CD to the object to be captured specified by the image capturing condition input unit, and, when the determined distance reaches a predetermined distance or the determined heading reaches a predetermined heading, carries out image capturing using a camera.